If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

This is absolutely sickening, and #45 is, of course, issuing mealymouthed and noncommittal statements that don't call out the rioters.

His base.

Originally Posted by rugcat

Not even close. The current administration has made these people feel safer to come out in the open, but they've always been there. They are loud, vocal, and very much a minority.

I'm not sure they're as much of a minority in some parts of the country as they are in ours, RC (though there are actually a large number of hate groups in CA) There are enough of them, after all, to have gotten #45 elected. We don't know that all, or even most, of 45's voters are this kind of racist, but they certainly weren't worried enough about his being popular with the White Nationalist crowd to not vote for him and his hateful, divisive rhetoric.

Complacency and the shrugging off of terrifying views can allow a minority of people to take over. The bigots have already made the internet a cesspit of hate. These people are cowards, but now that they feel supported by the powers that be, more of them will likely come out from under their rocks.

We may see hate rallies attended by tens of thousands yet.

I hope this "event" results in increased support for organizations that fight hate and intolerance. I've had literature and an envelope from the Southern Poverty Law Center sitting on my counter for a week. I'm sending it off with a check today.

He's the one who said he didn't know anything about David Duke. LIE. He's the one who said he'd be better for Blacks than Hillary Clinton and what the hell do you have to lose? A LOT. He's the one who has put racist trash like Steve Bannon in the White House. DISGUSTING.

Trump has modified the message, but it's the Alt-Right's message of hate and division and he's not only carried their flag, he's wrapped himself in it.

We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!

As outrage and condemnation streamed in from all corners of the political spectrum, Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer did not mince words and directly blamed Trump. “I’m not going to make any bones about it,” Signer said. “I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in American today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president.”

This is how Donald Trump makes America Hate Again.

It is a dangerous time to be a black woman in America. It’s a time when we are not safe in the streets or at home or at school or at work and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Nobody. Not us. Not our mamas. Not the police. Not the people we elected to look out for our interests. Nobody. We’re just out here. Pearl Cleage

I'm not sure they're as much of a minority in some parts of the country as they are in ours, RC. There are enough of them, after all, to have gotten #45 elected. We don't know that all, or even most, of 45's voters are this kind of racist, but they certainly weren't worried enough about his being popular with the White Nationalist crowd to not vote for him and his hateful, divisive rhetoric.

Complacency and the shrugging off of terrifying views can allow a minority of people to take over. The bigots have already made the internet a cesspit of hate. These people are cowards, but now that they feel supported by the powers that be, more of them will likely come out from under their rocks.

I'm not trying to dismiss them as irrelevant. There are certain areas of this country where the views of the alt right are held by a significant percentage of the population.

And the fact that their views have become mainstream and have entered the White House via such despicable people as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka is troubling – as is the realization that these are the people Trump surrounds himself with and the people whose advice he listens to.

But in terms of the country as a whole, they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those who understand how pathetic and yet dangerous they are. The idea that we have fallen over the precipice and are now involved in chaos and a civil war between competing ideologies is not a true reflection of what's happening.

We may see hate rallies attended by tens of thousands yet.

I doubt it. Maybe somewhere like Alabama, (with apologies to all the good people who live there) but even so we have 300 million people in this country. You could collect 10,000 people who fervently believe the earth is flat. That doesn't mean we're headed back to the dark ages.

My first thought when I saw the video this morning was that North Korea ought to wipe us off the map like the hotbed of cockroaches we've become. The U.S. was always deeply racist and sexist; under Trump, it's getting worse by the second.

This is horrible. They're so emboldened they don't even hide behind masks.

But in terms of the country as a whole, they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those who understand how pathetic and yet dangerous they are. The idea that we have fallen over the precipice and are now involved in chaos and a civil war between competing ideologies is not a true reflection of what's happening. I doubt it. Maybe somewhere like Alabama, (with apologies to all the good people who live there) but even so we have 300 million people in this country. You could collect 10,000 people who fervently believe the earth is flat. That doesn't mean we're headed back to the dark ages.

It's lovely that there are more people who aren't Nazis than are. But I'll tell you the truth: I'm not finding that a massive comfort right now.

These people have killed somebody. On video. And the so-called leader of our country has said "...yeah, people shouldn't fight with each other, I guess."

I would like to know what I can do to stop this, because this minority of white supremacists is becoming louder and larger and more violent, apparently by the hour.

I would love to have an interviewer sit down with Trump and start off with: "The NeoNazi movement considers your daughter a race-traitor and would like to murder your son-in-law and grandchildren. Your opinion on that?"

He's the one who said he didn't know anything about David Duke. LIE. He's the one who said he'd be better for Blacks than Hillary Clinton and what the hell do you have to lose? A LOT. He's the one who has put racist trash like Steve Bannon in the White House. DISGUSTING.

Trump has modified the message, but it's the Alt-Right's message of hate and division and he's not only carried their flag, he's wrapped himself in it.

This is how Donald Trump makes America Hate Again.

This. ^^^^

He didn't mention the KKK or Nazis in his statement, referring to hate "on many sides" is what I heard. There is no equivocating. The alt-right Nazis were met by those who wish to condemn and stop their hate.

I would love to have an interviewer sit down with Trump and start off with: "The NeoNazi movement considers your daughter a race-traitor and would like to murder your son-in-law and grandchildren. Your opinion on that?"

That would be incredible.

An interesting take from a local pastor of color was that what's happening in Charlottesville can be seen as a blessing in disguise. (He wrote this before it was revealed that someone had died, I should note.) His logic is that events like Charlottesville do more to advance the cause of equality, by making it harder for white people to deny that racism exists and is a problem. I think he's onto something, but I haven't fully processed it yet, or figured out how to make it work in practice. The racists I know don't think they're racist, because they're passively racist. They see themselves as different from proactively racist people, such as those marching in Charlottesville. They are far more offended by the label "racist" than they are actual racism, because in their minds they don't bother or hurt anybody. They just mind their own and don't see other people's troubles as something that should bother them, and sure, maybe they use some offensive terms behind closed doors, but why's everything got to be so PC, anyway? So where I get stuck is how to make people with that mindset connect their views and conversations with what's happening in Charlottesville.

But in terms of the country as a whole, they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those who understand how pathetic and yet dangerous they are.

Just a reminder that the Nazis took control of Germany with, at their absolute height, 37% of the seats in the Reichstag. Just because "most of the country doesn't agree" doesn't mean these White Supremacists, with a supportive president and people pulling the strings in the WH, can't take us over the precipice. The ground is crumbling under our toes.

Just a reminder that the Nazis took control of Germany with, at their absolute height, 37% of the seats in the Reichstag. Just because "most of the country doesn't agree" doesn't mean these White Supremacists, with a supportive president and people pulling the strings in the WH, can't take us over the precipice. The ground is crumbling under our toes.

It's really not. The violence from the alt right during this Neo Nazi demonstration is receiving condemnation from everyone, left, right, and center. Except, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump.

Far from showing the strength of the alt right movement, it's nothing but a big setback for them and their ideals. They are dangerous people and need to be taken seriously. But the ground is not crumbling, not by any means.

Just a reminder that the Nazis took control of Germany with, at their absolute height, 37% of the seats in the Reichstag. Just because "most of the country doesn't agree" doesn't mean these White Supremacists, with a supportive president and people pulling the strings in the WH, can't take us over the precipice. The ground is crumbling under our toes.

I refuse to believe our circumstances are anything similar to this. First, we are not in a severe depression. I believe Nazi Germany was in dire economic straights nationally when Hitler came to power. One white nationalist protest does not make a movement significant.

Some of you may recall one of the latest blow-ups of infighting that has been occurring in the White House: The Bannon/Gorka alt-right faction vs McMaster who has been trying to fire some Flynn appointees which McMaster was only able to do when White House Chief of Staff Kelly came on board.

The seven-page document, which eventually landed on the president’s desk, precipitated a crisis that led to the departure of several high-level NSC officials tied to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The author of the memo, Rich Higgins, who was in the strategic planning office at the NSC, was among those recently pushed out.

The full memo, dated May 2017, is titled “POTUS & Political Warfare.” It provides a sweeping, if at times conspiratorial, view of what it describes as a multi-pronged attack on the Trump White House.

At times conspiratorial is a serious understatement.

Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”

The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president’s agenda....

McMaster set out to clean house, a source close the White House said — getting rid of NSC staffers linked to the memo, perceived as loyal to his predecessor, Michael Flynn, or simply those with whom he’d butted heads over foreign policy. Among those fired was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC’s top intelligence official, and Derek Harvey, who handled the NSC’s Middle East portfolio.

Lest you wonder if Trump believed the conspiracies described in the memo:

In a comedy of errors, Trump later learned from Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close friend of the president, that the memo’s author had been fired. Trump was “furious,” the senior administration official said. “He is still furious.”

And of course there is the white nationalism/homophobia glaring in the memo:

The memo calls out those pushing for rights “based on sex or ethnicity,” which is a “direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed.” It also says that “transgender acceptance” is “denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one’s sex.”

From the memo itself, it looks like they see the whole Republican leadership as RINOs:

Republican Leadership - More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to "support and defend the Constitution," the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that. These "conservatives" become increasingly indistinguishable from their democratic counterparts save that they misrepresent themselves to their constituents . Lacking the discernment to recognize their situation, they will work with globalists, corporatists, and the international financial interests and will likewise service the deep state. These establishment Republicans are the hard left's designated defeat mechanism in the destruction of the old regime as well as the American ideal. 1 Because candidate Trump publicly exposed them for their duplicitous activities, they are at risk as long as Trump can turn on them and are, therefore, bitter foes. Candidate Trump's success remains an ongoing existential threat to establishment Republicans.

On the positive side of this, surely the Republican legislators are not going to work too hard to keep Trump if Mueller gives them even a tiny reason to impeach this madhouse.

At least three people were killed and 35 injured after protests turned violent in the US state of Virginia, as white nationalists protesting plans to remove the statue of a Confederate general clashed with counter-demonstrators and a car ploughed into a crowd, officials said.

My first thought when I saw the video this morning was that North Korea ought to wipe us off the map like the hotbed of cockroaches we've become. The U.S. was always deeply racist and sexist; under Trump, it's getting worse by the second.

This is horrible. They're so emboldened they don't even hide behind masks.

It is horrible, but I doubt that North Korea, or the countries that actually could wipe more than a city or two of ours off the map are better in the racist/sexist/homophobia department. I suspect that China and Russia are possibly worse in many ways.

Heck, even Europe and Canada, which seem enviably progressive to many liberal Americans, have a dark underbelly of Xenophobic haters.

It's hard to get a good handle on the actual percentages in any culture or country, because a lot depends on which questions are asked (and how they are asked) by pollsters. Also, we've at least gotten to the point in the US where most people are aware that racism is a bad thing, so we tend to be reluctant to label the biases we still have (conscious or unconscious) as racism, not to mention the institutional biases that hurt traditionally marginalized groups.

People are very good at compartmentalizing and holding simultaneously incongruous views, and of course, many refuse to speak to pollsters at all, or they will lie to them.

Not to say that the US doesn't have some unique and serious issues with our history and the way racism has played out here, and that those issues don't mix with other cultural values and biases (such as our acceptance of violence as a means of solving problems and our almost religious belief in bootstrapping and going it alone) in horrific ways.

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book in the 80s, The Wild Shore, about a post apocalyptic America that had been taken down and isolated from the rest of the world in a series of terrorist attacks in which the rest of the world colluded. It's not super plausible, but it was an interesting "what if?" scenario.

My first thought when I saw the video this morning was that North Korea ought to wipe us off the map like the hotbed of cockroaches we've become. The U.S. was always deeply racist and sexist; under Trump, it's getting worse by the second.

This is horrible. They're so emboldened they don't even hide behind masks.

...the images we saw in Charlottesville today and yesterday convey an entirely different sort of threat. They draw their menace not from what is there—mostly, young white men in polos and T-shirts goofily brandishing tiki torches—but from what isn’t: the masks, the hoods, the secrecy that could at least imply a sort of shame. We used to whisper these thoughts, the new white supremacists suggest. But now we can say them out loud. The “Unite the Right” rally wasn’t intended to be a Klan rally at all. It was a pride march.

The shameless return of white supremacy into America’s public spaces seems to be happening by degrees, and quickly. It wasn’t until most journalists left the conference of the innocuously named “National Policy Institute” in November that my colleague Daniel Lombroso captured Richard Spencer leading the attendees in open Nazi salutes. Spencer’s intention—to make normal that gesture and all the sentiments that underpin it—is no more secret than the identities of his tiki torch-wielding bannermen. "I don't see myself as a marginal figure who's going to be hated by society,” Spencer said to Daniel. “I see myself as a mainstream figure.”

For the moment, you can still spot the subtle boundaries that will have shifted if Spencer and his fellow-travelers succeed. One appeared, for example, in Graeme Wood’s June 2017 Atlantic story on Spencer, when one of his associates requested anonymity: “I have a ‘normie’ [conventional] job,” the young man said, “and I don’t want to get punished for this.” How soon until that young man no longer fears the consequences of his ideas?

“Norms” is such a bloodless, abstract word, which is a shame, because it describes such a bloody real thing. Norms impose genuine and manifold restraints on human behavior. They undergird all the gentle, civic niceties that make human society possible. Laws can codify and reinforce these norms, but the norms are what keep us from savagery.

It would recently have been normal for a president to condemn in harsh tones the participants in a march for white supremacy on the streets of an American city. Today it is not.

Welcome to the New Abnormal.

Originally Posted by Mclesh

He didn't mention the KKK or Nazis in his statement, referring to hate "on many sides" is what I heard. There is no equivocating. The alt-right Nazis were met by those who wish to condemn and stop their hate.

I feel sick now.

Originally Posted by regdog

It's 6 PM Eastern time and DJT has still not denounced the Nazis.

Originally Posted by cmhbob

You weren't supposed to notice that.

That's okay. The Nazis did and they loved Trump's splitting the difference and letting them off the hook. From The Daily Stormer website (and I won't embed a link because HELL NO).

Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us.

He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate...on both sides!

So he implied the antifa* are haters.

There was no counter-signaling of us at all.

He said he loves us all.

Also refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him.

No condemnation at all.

When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room.

Really really good.

God bless him.

Trump knows his base and his base knows Trump. As ex-KKK and Nazi, but resurgent supremacist David Duke reminded Trump, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

Truth. We're not the ones who supported Trump or voted for Trump. He was never going to protect our rights or even our lives. Why would he? What's in it for him?
Now you can be sick, McLesh. Take some small comfort in knowing you are not alone.

We are so fucked.

It is a dangerous time to be a black woman in America. It’s a time when we are not safe in the streets or at home or at school or at work and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Nobody. Not us. Not our mamas. Not the police. Not the people we elected to look out for our interests. Nobody. We’re just out here. Pearl Cleage